'Children's Book' creative, cautious

THE CHILDREN'S BOOK. By A.S. Byatt. Knopf. 678 pages. $26.95.

"The Children's Book," A.S. Byatt's Booker-shortlisted novel, is a huge extravaganza of a book, easily her most ambitious since "Possession."

As she did with "Possession," Byatt turns to literature for inspiration and subject matter. Readers steeped in British children's stories will detect traces of E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, James Barrie and Rudyard Kipling, not to mention the many fairy tales and myths that wind through the plot. By playing with the creation and re-creation of old forms, Byatt is able to suggest something about perennial dreads and longings.

"The Children's Book" introduces a beautiful storybook world, only to dismantle it. In the opening scene, set in 1895, two boys in the Prince Consort Gallery, which later will be renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum, discover a third boy squatting among the glass cases. In true fairy tale fashion, Philip Warren, the plucky orphan boy, is recognized for his true gifts and taken to live in the happy home of Tom Wellwood, one of his rescuers.

Todefright, where the Wellwoods live, is a stone and timber farmhouse in the Kentish countryside, shot through with golden light and populated by seven children and sundry adults. Yet even Tom, who is under the spell of the place, fears that "everything might be cardboard and plaster of Paris."

And no wonder! Tom's mother is Olive Wellwood, a compulsive writer of children's tales. Tom, who will become the novel's most conspicuous boy/man, is well-aware that illusions are both exciting and dangerous. His mother has created for each of her children a personal story that she adds to throughout their lives. The plots of her stories start with escape from humdrum reality, but ultimately her art only repeats and reinforces the conditions of life. Tom, for instance, who doesn't like either the dark or transgression, is sent by his mother, via story, into an underground world where a rat guards his stolen shadow.

Olive Wellwood believes that tales endlessly re-form themselves, "like severed worms, or branching rivers of water and metal."

Byatt's novel has no single protagonist or even central family. Instead, she imagines branching or overlapping versions of the same stories, played out in different households. Her families are artistic, left-leaning, free-loving types who race away from Victorian homilies. At the same time, they succumb to darkness and stall out in retreat from their bright futures.

"The Children's Book," like its plots and characters, is deliciously multifaced, celebrating the richness and variety of the creative faculty while it also cautions about the limits of art.